The next time Cruz shows up here he should tear himself away from his friends at Goldman Sachs and make a side trip to the Bronx and explain himself there on New York values; or to the Lower East Side, or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Jamaica, Queens, or 125th St. in Harlem. He should go talk to people in the Rockaways or Staten Island, the hardened survivors who bound together after Hurricane Sandy, about New York values. Or finally he should go all the way downtown, and back to September 2001.
Here is what New York values are: New York values are a young guy, a paralegal, literally giving somebody he doesnt know the shirt off his back on a subway because winter has finally come to the city and brought freezing temperatures with it. New York values are the New York taxi driver who traveled three boroughs across four days to find the guy who had left $1,400 in his cab, so he could return the money to him. You know what that really was? It was the real life of a city that Ted Cruz knows nothing about. He is simply another tourist here, one constantly on the make.
The best of this city is the best of this country, and always has been. When it was hit in a way that no American city had ever been hit, it came together and rose up together in a moment as thrilling as any America had ever seen.
This wasnt the civil rights movement, it was a different kind of movement, to lower Manhattan. That was where the city was stronger and better than it ever had been on Sept. 12, when in the words of the great Pete Hamill, the city first got to one knee, and then began to get up. We will never know how it would have gone in another American city. We just know how it went here.
New York values? New York values are the ironworkers who carried their tools in backpacks and gym bags and, by God, walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, or all the way downtown from all the way uptown.
One of them I know simply said to a cop who didnt want to let him get close to where the towers had been. And the guy said, They need me. I cut steel.